If it’s very quiet, about four in the morning, if you press your ear to the mattress, you can hear it. More faint than a heartbeat. Way off in the distance. Beyond your neighborhood. It pounds, arrhythmic, episodic. Bam, bam, bam, bam, bam . . . silence . . . bam, bam, bam, bam, bam. You can only hear it when everything else is silent. Four in the morning. These are the mills of the gods and they grind exceeding small. These are gods of Joel and Ethan Coen.
If we look at the three recent movies written and directed by the brothers, that bad, old god tips his hand. No Country For Old Men and True Grit are two evangelical-toned Westerns, neo-noirs, with all the ironic humor of that genre and A Serious Man is the darkest of comedies. Curious also that the first and last scripts are cut from well-known literature. In fact, the spiritual fabric of No Country For Old Men seems to have been clipped whole cloth from the black robes of Cormac McCarthy.
No Country’s Anton Chigurh is interesting enough to have his own Wikipedia page. Chigurh is described often as a sociopath, killing without compassion or guilt. In fact, we don’t know how he processes his work, but it seems more of a calling than a sickness. In the famous coin toss scene, he takes a very ecclesiastical tone with his unfortunate ‘friend-o,’ instructing him that destruction is always latent and often inscrutable. He takes peanuts from the man and leaves him wisdom.
Josh Brolin’s Llewellyn Moss gets several Chigurh sermons, all of which he pointedly defies. He immediately takes the coin toss, and in contrast to his part in True Grit (Tom Cheney), he never whines and takes what’s coming to him off camera. His wife, Carla Jean, gets the cruelest deal but also gets a crucial line, telling Chigurh before he strikes, “You don’t have to do this.” Chigurh suggests that such an attitude is common but fundamentally false. He tells her, “I got here the same way the coin did.” At the end of our story, we are all visited by Chigurh, the ultimate bad penny.
In True Grit, Mattie Ross must also take her chances. Although she never enunciates it, her actions suggest that true grit comprises rational and predictable behavior. She has no qualms over Marshal Cogburn’s chaotic ways early in the story, not until she believes he violates their business arrangement. The fact that she is a child allows the Coens (following the book) to present her naïve reliance on such simplistic Protestant order as virginal and dear.
Initially, Mattie says, “You must pay for everything in this world, one way and another. There is nothing free, except the grace of God.” By the end of the story, however, Mattie has given up childish things. She is faced with a reckoning when Moon dies, wronged, away from family and despite his wish for redemption. In the original movie John Wayne speaks to him with regret and sympathy; however, Jeff Bridges, creating a much more harrowing character, intones to the dying Moon, “There’s nothing I can do for you, son.” His voice comes out of the crypt.
After several of these traumatic killings, Mattie’s POV is filmed with a reverse tracking shot. This seems to signify motion away from her Cartesian reference frame and into geometry of Cogburn, a place where her theoretical morality has never penetrated. Winding Stair Mountain, where rules are serpentine, if ever made explicit.
Tom Cheney does not meet the death that Mattie desires, not even the more pragmatic end offered by LeBouf or Cogburn. He falls over a cliff and pays his debt in neither vengeance nor jurisprudence. Despite this, in the final reel, Mattie does find the true grit she longs for in Cogburn. His pragmatic morality cheating her death . . . in effect, snatching the coin out of the air. He’s a hero very much like Ed Tom Bell, who, bereft the grace of god, just makes his way in the world. They both must rely on a more primitive grace that could just as easily go very bad.
And finally, we have A Serious Man, a valid adjective for everyone above; however, Larry Gopnik has a different cultural perspective. This story, written directly for the screen, is the Coen’s Book of Job and a sardonic response to the injustices depicted ithe other two movies. Larry’s journey includes an encounter with three, increasingly elliptical, wise men. When we finally meet the oldest and wisest of them, Rabbi Marshak, he says, “Just be a good boy,” after first quoting the advice of the Jefferson Airplane.
This reminds us that A Serious Man is a comedy and a self-admitted attempt of the Coens to celebrate and mock their mid-60’s Old Testament upbringing. There seems little difference to them between Hashem and Anton Chiguhr.
The reckoning is that which is given by Cogburn to Mattie, the fire in the horn carried by Ed Tom’s father. In the good news offered by the Coens, we still must sit on the ash heap but we don’t sit alone. It is the responsibility of us, the humans, to offer each other the justice, the grace, in which this god has no part. Is the inscription on the goy’s teeth an act of god? asks the rabbi, Who knows? Hashem doesn't owe us an explanation. But helping people . . . could it hurt?
The mills envisioned by the Coen Brothers grind both grain and chaff. Justice is what you make of the powder. Listen tonight as you fall asleep.